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During 23 hours of interviews with Patty, the psychiatrist said, he became convinced that she was telling the truth. West was one of the four experts appointed by Judge Carter in September to determine if Patty was stable enough to go into court. In a 135-page document that he wrote with Margaret Singer, a Berkeley psychologist, West raised doubts that Patty was then competent to stand trial. He also concluded that she was so thoroughly influenced by her captors that she had no choice but to go along on the bank robbery. Backing up Bailey's claims, West said that Patty had experienced "a classic example of 'coercive persuasion.' It was a case of be accepted [by the S.L.A.] or be killed."
Lecturing the jury like an amiable college professor, West emphasized the traumatic effects of Patty's kidnaping. At one time, said West, Patty was a girl "whose most important preoccupations" were minor doubts about her upcoming marriage and worries about selecting a silver pattern. Then she was abducted from her own apartment and confined in tiny closets for 57 days. The change, said West, "was about as violent a transition as I have ever seen."
The psychiatrist drew a close analogy between Patty's experience and that of the Air Force officers he had examined. Not only did she live in constant fear, but she was isolated for long stretches and harangued with polemics. Her personality, said West, "became acutely regressed," and she "developed a childlike dependency upon her captors."
West characterized Patty's reaction as the "survivor syndrome," saying that she felt her only hope of living "lay in winning acceptance by or becoming part of the S.L.A." Patty was forced to adopt in part the psychological defense mechanism of "dissociation"—separating her acts from her true personality. West said he found no evidence that Patty actually believed any of the S.L.A. views she advocated—"the phrases she mouthed" were simply things she had to say. As "Tania," said West, Patty did what the S.L.A. asked.
In West's view, Patty exhibited symptoms of dissociation when he brought up the subject of the bank robbery. She spoke about it like someone "trying to reconstruct a dream." What about the shoplifting fracas at Mel's Sporting Goods store, in which Patty helped the Harrises escape by firing weapons over their heads? West explained it away by saying that she performed exactly as she had been conditioned to do. He made much of Patty's first remark to the Harrises: "Did I do it right?" Patty, said the psychiatrist, was seeking their approval as though she were "a child."
After Patty was captured, her signing into jail as an "urban guerrilla" and giving a clenched-fist salute were symptomatic of her condition. There is, said West, a kind of "hanging on for a few days until you're really sure you are not in dangerous territory."